4 ms·

An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agr

An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity because people like the way it sounds. Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does something that offends the sensibilities of the internet crowd and then everyone goes and down votes their results because it violates the current ziegiest

ren_engineer 4y ago
>aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent there are tons of ways to prevent that by weighting votes and only taking a random sample. SEO is basically a war where SEOs find a way to exploit Google's algorithm and Google tries to respond. Backlinks were Google's original solution to keyword spam that made other search engines suck, they didn't expect people would create entire sites or pay other websites to send links to them so they could rank higher. Backlinks were themselves considered to be "votes" for quality similar to citations in academia. The problem is the barrier to entry to make a site and link to it is high, so SEOs themselves are often the only ones to do it. Adding some sort of voting mechanism would allow actual readers to give an opinion on quality, although you'd probably see SEOs pay people to vote on their link via a VPN switching IPs, so only people with established Google accounts could be allowed to vote. Obviously its a huge challenge, which is why Google is worth hundreds of billions for even partially solving it
- debesyla 4y ago
  I guess a return of "don't show this page in my results" could work better: it removes the worst results and it's hard to fake, no influencer is going to pay to downvote 200 pages and if they do, it would be easy to see that same user downvoted everything everything at random, without even clicking trough to read. Helps for both search users and the platform. Like a free moderation service. Why have an employee too check if these pages should be removed if a crowd of tracked users can do it. I wonder where is my view wrong because I wonder why isn't there such system yet...
  - guiambros 4y ago
    You'd still have to deal with adversarial spam. Competitor A pays a botnet to visit and downvote Competitor B's links at will, thus tanking its ranking. In order to detect malicious activity you'd have to use a bunch of other signals, and also to use the downvotes with some suspicion, so you're back at looking content quality, reputation, page speed, and many other signals. Which sounds very similar to status quo. Personally I'd like to see some sort of explicit input. If not used collectively, at least to customize my own results, like it happens on YT/Netflix/Instagram/etc - e.g. "never show results again from this site", or "I dislike this type of content".
pixl97 4y ago
>The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because You forgot to add "Because clever posters use bots to give an early upvote boost to their posts, and downvote competing posts" And the more eyeballs on the site, the more things will be manipulated this way by bad actors.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Yeah, it's nice to see the best parts of Digg survived! /s
DoughnutHole 4y ago
People are already appending "reddit" to their search queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to base search results for anything that's not plain uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as such. For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search needs. AI generated spam will likely always be better at gaming a search algorithm than a human. Human moderation has its flaws but at least we're very familiar with them - they might be worth dealing with if it keeps the internet vaguely usable.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Lots of reddit is already pretty useless, drowning in people who are desperate to sound clever by regurgitating one of the same 50 meme jokes with some minor twist to it. And the astroturfing on the political reddits are likely to start hitting the niche ones with products getting pushed by manufacturers. Just buy accounts that have been built by bots on front-page subreddits, then have them make AI-driven positive comments on the niche subreddits and now you've got organic-looking advertisement for your product. Moderators likely won't help since they are there mostly to keep the trolls out (or they're more focused on whatever political axe they're grinding).
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    Reddit is also having some pretty serious problems with bots reposting highly upvoted content, both in posts and comments. Sometimes it gets spotted -- especially when the bots pick content which was specific to some point in time, or when they repost a comment out of context -- but a lot of it goes unnoticed, especially in comment threads.
- spoils19 4y ago
  Myself, I append hackernews to my search queries as the discourse quality is much higher as well as the communities maturity. Vox populi, Vox de!

ren_engineer 4y ago

>aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent there are tons of ways to prevent that by weighting votes and only taking a random sample. SEO is basically a war where SEOs find a way to exploit Google's algorithm and Google tries to respond. Backlinks were Google's original solution to keyword spam that made other search engines suck, they didn't expect people would create entire sites or pay other websites to send links to them so they could rank higher. Backlinks were themselves considered to be "votes" for quality similar to citations in academia. The problem is the barrier to entry to make a site and link to it is high, so SEOs themselves are often the only ones to do it. Adding some sort of voting mechanism would allow actual readers to give an opinion on quality, although you'd probably see SEOs pay people to vote on their link via a VPN switching IPs, so only people with established Google accounts could be allowed to vote. Obviously its a huge challenge, which is why Google is worth hundreds of billions for even partially solving it

debesyla 4y ago
I guess a return of "don't show this page in my results" could work better: it removes the worst results and it's hard to fake, no influencer is going to pay to downvote 200 pages and if they do, it would be easy to see that same user downvoted everything everything at random, without even clicking trough to read. Helps for both search users and the platform. Like a free moderation service. Why have an employee too check if these pages should be removed if a crowd of tracked users can do it. I wonder where is my view wrong because I wonder why isn't there such system yet...
- guiambros 4y ago
  You'd still have to deal with adversarial spam. Competitor A pays a botnet to visit and downvote Competitor B's links at will, thus tanking its ranking. In order to detect malicious activity you'd have to use a bunch of other signals, and also to use the downvotes with some suspicion, so you're back at looking content quality, reputation, page speed, and many other signals. Which sounds very similar to status quo. Personally I'd like to see some sort of explicit input. If not used collectively, at least to customize my own results, like it happens on YT/Netflix/Instagram/etc - e.g. "never show results again from this site", or "I dislike this type of content".

pixl97 4y ago

>The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because You forgot to add "Because clever posters use bots to give an early upvote boost to their posts, and downvote competing posts" And the more eyeballs on the site, the more things will be manipulated this way by bad actors.

giantrobot 4y ago
Yeah, it's nice to see the best parts of Digg survived! /s

DoughnutHole 4y ago

People are already appending "reddit" to their search queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to base search results for anything that's not plain uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as such. For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search needs. AI generated spam will likely always be better at gaming a search algorithm than a human. Human moderation has its flaws but at least we're very familiar with them - they might be worth dealing with if it keeps the internet vaguely usable.

lamontcg 4y ago
Lots of reddit is already pretty useless, drowning in people who are desperate to sound clever by regurgitating one of the same 50 meme jokes with some minor twist to it. And the astroturfing on the political reddits are likely to start hitting the niche ones with products getting pushed by manufacturers. Just buy accounts that have been built by bots on front-page subreddits, then have them make AI-driven positive comments on the niche subreddits and now you've got organic-looking advertisement for your product. Moderators likely won't help since they are there mostly to keep the trolls out (or they're more focused on whatever political axe they're grinding).
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Reddit is also having some pretty serious problems with bots reposting highly upvoted content, both in posts and comments. Sometimes it gets spotted -- especially when the bots pick content which was specific to some point in time, or when they repost a comment out of context -- but a lot of it goes unnoticed, especially in comment threads.
spoils19 4y ago
Myself, I append hackernews to my search queries as the discourse quality is much higher as well as the communities maturity. Vox populi, Vox de!